Metal poor stars

Title: The first chemical enrichment in the universe and the formation of hyper metal-poor stars
Authors: Nobuyuki Iwamoto, Hideyuki Umeda, Nozomu Tominaga, Ken'ichi Nomoto, Keiichi Maeda
Comments: To be published in Science. 12 pages, 3 figures

The recent discovery of a hyper metal-poor (HMP) star, whose metallicity Fe/H is smaller than 1/100,000 of the solar ratio, together with one earlier HMP star, has raised a challenging question if these HMP stars are the actual first generation, low mass stars in the Universe. We argue that these HMP stars are the second generation stars being formed from gases which were chemically enriched by the first generation supernovae. The key to this solution is the very unusual abundance patterns of these HMP stars with important similarities and differences. We can reproduce these abundance features with the core-collapse ``faint'' supernova models which undergo extensive matter mixing and fallback during the explosion.